Available:*
Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
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Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | FICTION HADDON | 31330008820551 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Amesbury Public Library | FIC HADDON | 32114002534270 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Essex - T.O.H.P. Burnham Free Library | F HAD | 32119000391821 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Georgetown Peabody Library | FIC HADDON | 32120001269156 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Groton Public Library | FIC HADDON | 37003701914393 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | FIC HADDON | 30470001728731 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | FIC/HADDON M | 31479007019945 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Lawrence Public Library | FIC HAD | 31549004784996 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Littleton - Reuben Hoar Library | F HADDON | 39965002140977 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | FIC HADDON | 31481005393595 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Merrimac Public Library | F HAD | 32125001404711 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Methuen - Nevins Memorial Library | FIC HAD | 31548003257558 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Middleton - Flint Public Library | F HADDON | 32126001680078 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | FIC HADDON M | 32128003764181 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library | F HADDON | 31478010127703 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library | FIC HADDON, M. | 31550002349550 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Rockport Public Library | FIC HADDON | 32129002388576 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Rowley Public Library | FIC HAD | 32130000934940 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Tewksbury Public Library | FICTION HADDON | 32132003152066 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... West Newbury - G.A.R. Memorial Library | F HAD | 32135001454384 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | F HADDON | 31990004791120 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Wilmington Memorial Library | FICTION HADDON, MARK | 32136003378167 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
In a bravura feat of storytelling, Mark Haddon calls upon narratives ancient and modern to tell the story of Angelica, a young woman trapped in an abusive relationship with her father. When a young man named Darius discovers their secret, he is forced to escape on a boat bound for the Mediterranean. To his surprise he finds himself travelling backwards over two thousand years to a world of pirates and shipwrecks, of plagues and miracles and angry gods. Moving seamlessly between the past and the present, Haddon conjures the worlds of Angelica and her would-be savior in thrilling fashion. As profound as it is entertaining, The Porpoise is a stirring and endlessly inventive novel from one of our finest storytellers.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The latest from Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) is an artfully crafted story of layered lives. Uberwealthy Philippe finds out his wife, Maja, has died in a plane crash, though the baby she was carrying, Angelica, is saved. Philippe's grief takes a darker, sexual turn, and he begins molesting Angelica when she's a young girl. Their reclusive existence is eventually intruded upon by a young man named Darius, who arrives with a business proposition for Philippe when Angelica is 16. Angelica sees the young man as her savior, until Philippe attacks him and drives him away; Darius escapes to a ship called the Porpoise. The tale then shifts into mythical territory, transmogrifying Darius into Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and his adventures-mostly mirroring those depicted in the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which is at least partially attributed to Shakespeare-take him through ocean voyages and fierce battles. As the novel moves back and forth between present and past, female characters of Pericles's story are sometimes depicted as distant relatives of Angelica, and her modern-day traumas with Philippe are woven throughout, building both story lines to startling, disparate conclusions. Haddon's ambitious tale captures the ethos of tragic Shakespearean vibrations and the tangle of lives that magically intersect. The prose is exquisite and elevates this story that blends reality and mythology to great effect. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Haddon's (The Pier Falls and Other Stories, 2016) new novel works on multiple levels: as an entertaining adventure, a creative patchwork of an ancient story's many manifestations, and an exploration of how women suffer when men control their fates. A pregnant woman dies in a plane crash, but her baby, Angelica, survives and grows up in luxury, although her father, Philippe, sexually abuses and isolates her, and the staff on his English estate are little help. An attempted rescuer, the son of Philippe's business associate, is attacked by Philippe and flees for his life. Aboard the Porpoise, an oceangoing yacht, the young man's journey turns fantastical as he transforms into Pericles, Prince of Tyre, hero of the Shakespearean play, whose story parallels the modern-day situation. The settings are colorfully rendered, and the fast-paced action is occasionally disorienting as scenes alternate between Pericles' quasi-Greek world, a gritty Jacobean London, and Angelica's traumatic life. Considerable attention is paid to the viewpoints of Pericles' abandoned wife and daughter. Playful yet unsettling, Haddon's tale offers timeless themes and should particularly interest aficionados of myths and legends.--Sarah Johnson Copyright 2019 Booklist
Guardian Review
This stunning novel based on the legend of Pericles navigates myth, imagination and the power of storytelling The two novels Mark Haddon published in the decade following The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time , A Spot of Bother and The Red House , were both contemporary domestic dramas. Brisk, incisive, and unsparingly honest about family dynamics, they were eminently readable; but as Haddon put it in a recent interview, when you consider the wide-open possibilities of the novel as a form, they were "a bit like having the Millennium Falcon but only using it for going to Sainsbury's". His 2016 short-story collection The Pier Falls was a revelation: it blasted into space and followed Victorian explorers into the jungle; injected Greek myth with savage realism in "The Island", and in "Wodwo" brought the medieval mystery of Gawain and the Green Knight into the present day. The Porpoise gloriously expands the restless, visionary spirit of those tales. It is a version of Pericles , with a daughter abused by her father, another daughter lost and in danger, missing mothers and a man on the run who begins his story as an adventuring hero and ends it a broken wanderer. It spreads itself across two realities, opening among the contemporary elite as Philippe, whose family has been "part of a global aristocracy" since Hellenistic times, raises his daughter Angelica as his sexual plaything. "She is made from his body ... How could there be a boundary of any kind between them?" Angelica's mother died in the plane crash that triggered her birth; she is utterly isolated by wealth and rootlessness. Though they live in south-east England, "Beyond those dark hills right now it might as well be Nunavut. It might as well be the Skeleton Coast. Roasted hulks and sun-leathered corpses. It might as well be Pentapolis or Ephesus." In the play co-written by Shakespeare, Pericles is the challenger to an incestuous father. Seeking to marry the king's daughter, he must solve the riddle that encodes her abuse: a "confession hidden in plain sight", similarly insulated by wealth and status. Here Philippe's adversary is Darius, a globe-trotting young playboy - and then the novel shimmers and shifts direction, slipping into a classical past where the historical references of the early sections become vivid reality. We sail with Pericles, prince of Tyre; through feasts and famines, plagues and mutinies, the stories - and after-stories - of his lost wife and child unroll. We also dip into Jacobean London, in a fantastical riff on the death of Pericles 's co-writer George Wilkins, a brutal pimp whose corpse is gleefully urinated on by the women he's abused. This is not a book, then, that aims for the coherence of a conventional novel. The appropriately classical motif of weaving runs throughout, and the stitches at the back of the tapestry are on show. The Porpoise often hints at its own construction, with characters intuiting a significance to events that is just beyond their reach. The different worlds sometimes jut into each other as the narrative dances on the threshold between reality and imagination. Lonely, myth-obsessed Angelica "is both teller and listener. She forgets, sometimes, where the page ends and her mind begins." A Chinese landscape painting, which the artist vanished into after its completion, takes on a talismanic power. But the extraordinary force and vividness of Haddon's prose ensure that The Porpoise reads not as a metatextual game but as a continually unfolding demonstration of the transporting power of stories. Blunt, short sentences brimming with nouns - food, spices, weapons - propel the reader through a landscape vaguely familiar from legend but here brought into crisp focus. The narrative combines chilly omniscience - we are often informed of deaths to come - with an insistence on the limits and vulnerabilities of its human actors, and a second-by-second attention to fleeting detail. This is language that knows how to do things: sail a ship, make a gold buckle, negotiate the tides of the Thames. It's a stunningly effective combination of the quotidian and the mythic that, as in "The Island" or "Wodwo", pins impossibility to the page. At the beginning of his journey, the heroic Pericles "does not understand yet that adventure is the easiest of all challenges". Though it is, undeniably, a rollicking adventure story, like Haddon's short stories The Porpoise is also about humanity stripped down to its starkest elements by forces beyond its comprehension and control; about damage and survival, and the balancing act between the two. Appropriately for a novel inspired by rape, if there is an image that links the various storylines, it is female resistance: a crowd of vengeful revenants in the George Wilkins section, Diana and her companions protecting Pericles' daughter from a would-be assassin. Angelica only has the power of story to help her endure, but Haddon shows just how powerful that is.
Kirkus Review
A labyrinthine narrative that wends its way through classical myth, Shakespearean theater, and childlike fairy tale as it twists toward a tentative contemporary conclusion.British author Haddon has never written anything like the same book twice, but his fourth novel is in some ways even more audacious and ambitious than his breakthrough debut (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, 2003). The plot propels itself forward at a furious clip, yet key characters disappear (and occasionally reappear) as the basic premise hopscotches centuries and countries. It begins with a bang, or rather a crash. A very rich man loses his very beautiful and pregnant wife when the small plane on which he never should have let her fly crashes into farmland, the pilot momentarily distracted by her beauty. A doctor who happens to be passing assists in the birth of her daughter, whose life begins as her mother's ends. The forlorn father can find life's only consolation in his daughter, named Angelica, and they share an incestuously secret life amid "the vapour of fantasy which always surrounds the rich, powerful and reclusive." Angelica has some sense that these intimacies are wrong, a violation, but it is only with the arrival of the modern equivalent of a handsome prince that she feels she needs to escape; she needs this hero to rescue her, for, upon their first meeting, "she is already in thrall to an imagined future in which he takes her away from all this, and the knowledge that the fantasy is ridiculous does nothing to sour its addictive sweetness." The attempted rescue almost results in a murder, but the prince himself escapes. At which point the story shifts to a different father and daughter, a king and a princess, who may well be an earlier incarnation of the same father and daughter. This tale has proven captivating since classical times and was popularly given form in the Shakespearean play Pericles. So Pericles becomes a character in this novel, as does Shakespeare, or perhaps his ghost. Pericles marries the princess and becomes a mourning father whose pregnant wife dies during an ill-advised voyage. Or did she die? The adventures of Pericles consume 14 years of the narrative, in which he grieves his wife and might have to save his own daughter. And Angelica? The novel ends with her yet seems to open into a whole new world.The nature of narrative itself would seem to be the focus here in a novel that challenges readers to connect the multidimensional dots. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) offers an inspired transformation of the Greek tale of Apollonius of Tyre that effectively blends old and new that begins in the present with a small plane crash. The only survivor is Angelica, a newborn pulled from her dying mother's womb. Angelica grows up trapped in an incestuous relationship with her wealthy father and tries to escape with the help of a rich playboy named Darius, but she is thwarted. As Darius flees the island, he changes into Pericles, the prince of Tyre, sailing on the ship Porpoise in an ancient setting. Pericles travels to Tarsus, where he rescues the city, then flees to Pentapolis and marries the king's daughter, Chloe. But tragedy follows Pericles as he's separated from his wife, whom he believes has died in childbirth, and from his infant daughter. The novel concludes by returning to the present, with Angelica brutally facing her responsibilities as a lightning storm exacts a grisly revenge on her father. VERDICT The integration of a modern setting that reverts to ancient times and back again makes for a fascinating read. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 12/3/19.]--Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA